Some you win some you lose – but it seems that maxim doesn’t apply to Coolmore. When the world’s foremost breeding and racing operation ‘lose’, as in the case of their City of Troy’s humbling defeat in the Breeders’ Cup Classic, they still win, taking the £3m first prize of America’s premier international race with ‘reserve’ Sierra Leone. That Sierra Leone is born, bred and trained in America is mere detail. The son of Gun Runner, bought for $2.3m as a yearling, is owned by ‘The Lads’ as the Coolmore squad – mostly septuagenarians and octogenarians - are colloquially known. Sierra Leone was their ‘other runner’ here, on his merit but still mainly as an insurance policy if City of Troy crumbled.

Faces among The Lads in the Del Mar winner’s circle weren’t that long though master trainer Aidan O’Brien was elsewhere trying, with jockey Ryan Moore, to make sense of City of Troy’s comprehensive defeat. The Derby, Eclipse and Juddmonte winner tamely surrendered his claim to be the best horse on the planet. Sierra Leone might not be the best – he’d been beaten favourite in his three previous races, twice by Fierceness whom he overcame this time. But that is immaterial now. His stud value is cemented. City of Troy’s is undermined to the extent that it was obvious, despite his American parentage, that dirt is just not his surface.

Whether the Classic, the biggest race in America, promotes an unquestioned world champion is debatable even if it takes a great performance. After eighteen defeats O’Brien’s ambition to win a race which requires a particular horse on a specific day, will be aching from the gut punch of defeat. This wasn’t his or his horse’s day. There will be others. O’Brien, at just fifty-five, will not forever have dirt kicked in his face, as was the undoing of City of Troy.

On turf the foreigners at Del Mar were well-nigh unbeatable. The truly remarkable six-year-old Godolphin gelding Rebel’s Romance who has won Group Ones in Germany, Hong Kong, Qatar, Dubai and the UK this year alone, raised his career total to fifteen victories in the process of which he has won nearly £10m. His triumph, for the second time don’t forget, in Breeders’ Cup Turf (Grade1) enhanced trainer Charlie Appleby’s record at the meeting over the years to a 20 per cent strike rate – only sullied when his Two Thousand Guineas winner Notable Speech, running one of the lesser races to which he is prone, was overwhelmed in the Breeders’ Cup Mile.

Sheikh Mohammed’s Godolphin count their winnings but the achievement of Rebel’s Romance stands by itself and breathes life into the debate about the participation of geldings competing in Grade 1 races. Rebel’s Romance was a place behind Blue Stocking, the subsequent Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe winner, in the UK’s all-aged (all in, gelded or not) championship equivalent, the King George & Queen Elizabeth Stakes. But he and the winner there, Goliath, another gelding, were ineligible for the middle distance climax in Paris last month.

Blue Stocking’s trainer Ralph Beckett is my neighbour on Kimpton Downs, Hampshire. He is having a phenomenal season. Blue Stocking’s Arc has been the pinnacle but on Breeders’ Cup Saturday he had two more domestic winners at Newmarket, one a black type to add to the other 120 other this year. In the trainer’s table Beckett is second in number of winners and equal with leading trainer Aidan O’Brien’s twenty per cent strike rate.

Beckett had only had one previous Breeders’ Cup success and that a dozen years ago on the undercard in a stayers’ race since scrapped. His Starlust (by Zoustar) was one of the huge priced outsiders for the five-furlong Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint, Grade 1, worth £409,000 to the winner. In true American style their sprinters went off as though rocket propelled – far too fast and as they fizzled out. Starlust, under the wonder kid of his jockey generation, Rossa Ryan who had guided Blue Stocking in the Arc, got up to win by a neck.

Admirable as he is the three-year-old colt Starlust (by Zoustar) had only previously won three of his fourteen races and only one of them Group 3 – on Kempton’s sand. But that the Beckett stardust has been wondrously sprinkled among his horses this season was evident in Starlust’s finishing thrust. Until recent years the trainer had been noted for winning the occasional Group One with owner-bred horses – Look Here in 2008 and Talent 2013 both in the Epsom Oaks. But now he is having to turn away horses – though not the 4.4 million gns yearling he has been sent from the Sales: Starlust cost only 55,000gns at the same Sales two years ago.

Top of the list of attractions to Del Mar, southern California is surfing: horseracing comes an honorable second but for the 41st Breeders’ Cup World Championships not even the most important American Presidential election in history obliterated the meeting’s headlines. On a still day at Del Mar you can hear the Pacific waves breaking – that’s how near the grandstands are to the shore and how the track got its title - “Where the surf meets the turf”. There were no ‘quiet moments’ this year; there wasn’t even time to draw breath as one tumultuous race followed another raising a frantic, packed crowd to its feet.

At the racecourse gates they’d been greeted with the late Bing Crosby’s voice crooning Del Mar’s signature ‘toon’. At the opening ceremony in 1937 Crosby, at the height of his fame and a founding member along with Hollywood A-listers, sang Del Mar’s song.

Where the turf meets the surf

Down at old Del Mar

Take a plane

Take a train

Take a car.

There is a smile on every face

And a winner in each race

Where the turf meets the surf

At Del Mar

OK not Bing’s greatest hit but this meeting is an undoubted big hit – where the great and good of world racing meet and lock horns for fourteen Group 1s and over $31m in prize money. They will be back next year when the track again hosts America’s biggest race meeting.

The atmosphere on the first day ratcheted up when O'Brien equaled legendary US trainer D Wayne Lukas’s twenty Breeders’ Cup triumphs. Henri Matisse (by Wootton Bassett) swept to Juvenile Colts’ Turf glory under a superbly timed Ryan Moore ride.

“It was easy,” said Moore, eschewing his customary understatement. It was Ballydoyle team’s third successive victory in the event. Having conquered all other fields, lauded throughout the racing world as the most successful trainer of his age, O’Brien then produced another authentic champion – the unbeaten Lake Victoria (Frankel) in the Juvenile Fillies Turf, both races Grade 1, both £400,000 prizes. They looked to be the perfect springboard for City of Troy and the Classic the next day, Saturday - rehearsals for the climax of the show. They were intended ‘appetizers’ for City of Troy’s attempt at the ‘big one’, the centerpiece, the $5m Breeders’ Cup Classic.

But in the American vernacular if you “don’t jump, you’re for the high jump”. Speculation over what might be Ryan Moore’s tactics amounted to naught as his mount on whom he has come from all manner of positions on a horse and deemed “the best I’ve trained” by the always calculating O’Brien, fumbled the start. In the rear from the get go City of Troy quickly found himself ‘breathing sand’. Moore usually finds a way to dictate – to his mounts and to his opponents – he’d made all for instance in the Juddmonte International, come from behind in the Derby. But not this time. There won’t be a next time for City of Troy – but there certainly will be for O’Brien: for him the Classic is unfinished business.

I recall as far back Andre Fabre’s Arcangues also running, immediately, into kickback at Santa Anita, California, before pouncing late to win the 1993 Classic at 133-1. “A shocking, impossible victory,” belted out the incredulous commentator. And we still don’t know the reason - “An unknown known” as one leading American politician once famously said. Well, in his unfamiliarity with the surface City of Troy was asked to race upon for the first time, we have the obvious reason for his downfall.

Some you win, some you lose isn’t (certainly shouldn’t be) the maxim applied to American Presidential elections. If only the result of that seminal vote is accepted with as good grace as was the vanquishing of City of Troy. At Del Mar the Coolmore ‘lads’ took it on the chin again – they’ll be back: others still sought for answers in City of Troy’s eclipse. A “sucker punch”? They are right in one respect – a sucker punch is one thrown after the break – and that’s where this year’s Breeders’ Cup Classic was won and lost, right after the break from the stalls. What price City of Troy’s O’Brien successor punches his weight next year?